But if building your brainpower is that straightforward, why
don't more people do it? For the same reason that we fail to do
lots of worthy but less urgent self-improvement projects —
we're all really busy.

But are we really? A new article by Charles Chu
of site Better Humans raises an
eyebrow of skepticism at people who claim they simply don't have
enough time to feed their intellect with books. And he has math
on his side.

The simple math that proves you do have enough time to read

Chu tells the story of how reading 200 hundred books a year (yes,
200!) for the past several years has helped him turn his life
around, reconsider his career, and become much happier. It's a
fascinating tale. But Chu also anticipates the objections. That's
great for you, some might say, but my life is chaos.

Nope, counters Chu. If you're anything like the average American,
you actually have plenty of time to read just
as much as he did. All you have to do is make one little
substitution in your life. He starts with how much time you need:

"First, let's take a look at two statistics:

The average American reads 200 to 400 words per minute

Typical nonfiction books have about 50,000 words

Now, all we need are some quick calculations:

200 books x 50,000 words/book = 10 million words

10 million words/400 wpm = 25,000 minutes

25,000 minutes/60 = 417 hours

That's all there is to it. To read 200 books, simply spend 417
hours a year reading."

Before you object and say that there's no way you have 417 hours
a year to spare, Chu points out a few uncomfortable facts:

"Here's how much time a single American spends on social media
and TV in a year:

608 hours on social media

1,642 hours on TV

If those hours were spent reading instead, you could be reading
more than 1,000 books a year.

Here's the simple truth behind reading a lot of books: It's not
that hard. We have all the time we need."